![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I fear that I let my kid watch far too much television. I mean, she generally watches stuff that's pseudo-educational or at least not violent or anti-establishment, but the internets say that I should keep the TV remote under lock and key and so I feel a wee bit guilty and then I vow to do more STUFF with her. Today, she was watching an episode of Little Einsteins in which they were all wearing pirate hats, and I was Inspired. I grabbed a piece of posterboard, some crayons and a pair of scissors, and we turned out a passable pirate hat while lunch was in the oven.
Pirate Evie prefers a heart to a skull and crossbones. She was also a little annoyed with me for coloring in all of the background. I don't care much for unintentional white spaces. See, here is the reason I am bad at kids crafts. I can't seem to get a grip on it being a project that will be enjoyed by a small child and then tossed in the trash after a few days of abuse. This isn't a great picture of the hat itself but she is really REALLY hard to take pictures of right now. All she will do is squint at the camera. I think she believes she's being helpful in some way by doing this. She isn't.
After she had the hat, it was time for lunch and she spent the whole time talking about needing a ship. This made sense to me. She's a pirate! What kind of pirate is she without a ship? (Captain Jack Sparrow, actually, but I think that he might not ought to be her primary role model.)
So, I printed out a few coloring pages from the internet and set her to coloring the first one while I did some ocean construction. She was bored by the time I started glueing colored boats to posterboard (for sturdiness) and she ran off, saying, "YOU play crafts. I play something else."
I am completely unable to let something like this go, so I ended up doing the rest of this (including the coloring of three more ships--I fancy that you'll be able to tell which I did and which Evie did, but please don't hold my poor coloring skills against me) and I must also admit that I turned freaking Dora on for the last fifteen minutes just so I could keep her in the room. Parenting Fail.
She did think it was mildly cool once it was done, at least. She played with it for at least 45 seconds.
I thought it was kind of neat to have slots for the boats to go into so they could actually be moved around and played with. They were going to be pockets at first, but I ended up just adding a strip of waves to the top, and then cutting a slit all the way across so there'd be two levels of boat slots. That's when I realized that I should have saved myself a lot of trouble and just cut a few slits directly into the ocean, without bothering with the pocket thing at all, so I did some of those too. I also had planned to get a second piece of posterboard to attach everything to, and then cut out some accessory pieces--a sun, maybe an island, some birds, fish, etc. I thought Evie would dig that. By the time I had finished this part, though, and had lost her interest so thoroughly, I figured that any additional crafting would have been a waste of time. I guess I might add to it another day. She really does get excited about crafts at first, but they don't keep her engaged as long as it takes to finish something.
Pirate Evie prefers a heart to a skull and crossbones. She was also a little annoyed with me for coloring in all of the background. I don't care much for unintentional white spaces. See, here is the reason I am bad at kids crafts. I can't seem to get a grip on it being a project that will be enjoyed by a small child and then tossed in the trash after a few days of abuse. This isn't a great picture of the hat itself but she is really REALLY hard to take pictures of right now. All she will do is squint at the camera. I think she believes she's being helpful in some way by doing this. She isn't.
After she had the hat, it was time for lunch and she spent the whole time talking about needing a ship. This made sense to me. She's a pirate! What kind of pirate is she without a ship? (Captain Jack Sparrow, actually, but I think that he might not ought to be her primary role model.)
So, I printed out a few coloring pages from the internet and set her to coloring the first one while I did some ocean construction. She was bored by the time I started glueing colored boats to posterboard (for sturdiness) and she ran off, saying, "YOU play crafts. I play something else."
I am completely unable to let something like this go, so I ended up doing the rest of this (including the coloring of three more ships--I fancy that you'll be able to tell which I did and which Evie did, but please don't hold my poor coloring skills against me) and I must also admit that I turned freaking Dora on for the last fifteen minutes just so I could keep her in the room. Parenting Fail.
She did think it was mildly cool once it was done, at least. She played with it for at least 45 seconds.
I thought it was kind of neat to have slots for the boats to go into so they could actually be moved around and played with. They were going to be pockets at first, but I ended up just adding a strip of waves to the top, and then cutting a slit all the way across so there'd be two levels of boat slots. That's when I realized that I should have saved myself a lot of trouble and just cut a few slits directly into the ocean, without bothering with the pocket thing at all, so I did some of those too. I also had planned to get a second piece of posterboard to attach everything to, and then cut out some accessory pieces--a sun, maybe an island, some birds, fish, etc. I thought Evie would dig that. By the time I had finished this part, though, and had lost her interest so thoroughly, I figured that any additional crafting would have been a waste of time. I guess I might add to it another day. She really does get excited about crafts at first, but they don't keep her engaged as long as it takes to finish something.
